Mirrors, Too
by Gomro Morskopp
Summary: COMPLETE.  Kim has a strange experience with a mysterious assailant.  And then there's the subtext. Which is not the subtext you're thinking of.


DISCLAIMER: KP and I have never met personally. I've read several movie reviews that seem to have a problem with her identity. Maybe this will set the record straight. Warning: spoilers for the movie "Mirrors 2" incorporated in this tale. Soundtrack for this brief outburst: _Nothing to Fear_ by Oingo Boingo; _Logan's Run_ soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith, both on shuffle play.

* * *

He rushed into the room, expecting the worst, surprised to see her sitting up. "Kim, are you all right? I got here as fast as I could."

"I'm fine, Ron. The excitement's over." She waved him to a chair beside her hospital bed. Her hands and arms were bandaged. "Global Justice got there almost immediately." She wondered about that. Wade had Ron chipped for years without his knowledge; maybe GJ had her chipped as well. She was too great an asset to accidentally misplace. "And I'd already pretty much dealt with it by then. They were just batting cleanup."

"Man. I mean, just – man." Wade's message had shocked him to the soles of his shoes. "Who was it? Drakken and Shego? Chester Yapsby? Absolute Zer0?"

"Some woman I'd never seen before. Don't think she was working for anybody." Her voice sank to a whisper. "Close the door. I don't want anyone to hear this."

Her fiancé tiptoed to the door, peered left and right, eyes narrowed. A couple of orderlies in the hallway noticed his surveillance, shrugged and went on with their conversation. They saw goofy things every day.

He gently closed the door and tiptoed back to his chair. The television was quietly muttering to itself; Ron noticed that Timothy North was in the news, grabbed the remote, cranked up the volume. "Wait just a sec, KP, wanna see this –"

"—celebrated his 80th birthday today," squawked the TV, " amidst much fanfare from fans. Though North has had a long and varied career, to these people he will always be The Fearless Ferret."

Ron groaned. "Now, see, he's _not_ The Fearless Ferret. Magritte could have told them that."

"Magritte?"

"You know, French painter, _'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'_…only thing I remember from Art Appreciation class." Kim was still baffled; he decided to just press on. "North _played_ FF. And he did a great job. But the Fearless Ferret was the result of a lot of talent, a lot of genius, all come together in one place to make this amazing _thing_. He was a part of the glorious whole –"

"I was going to tell you about the _assassin_, Ron. But, you know, if The Fearless Ferret is all that, well, by all means _do_ continue." Her tone belied her words.

He muted the TV. "I'm done. And it wasn't _FF_, it was _Timothy North_."

"No big difference."

"What about the assassin?"

"I didn't tell anyone else this part. Not even Mom and Dad. I was afraid they'd think I – I was crazy. But it really happened. Just like this –"

_She'd come home exhausted. Strange how college classes could so deplete a person. Just wanted to get a shower and go to bed. _

_In the bathroom, she found herself examining her reflection, admiring her body. Peak condition. A few more scars than most twenty-year-olds had. The three on her upper left arm were perpetual evidence of how dangerous her crimefighting career could be. _

_Drakken and Shego had reformed in the wake of the Lorwardian invasion, and she'd made her peace with them both._

_But the scars remained. Kim's fingers lightly brushed across them__._

_Her reflection remained motionless, staring at her with a cold fury in its eyes._

"Some sort of hologram?" Ron ventured. "3-D laser projector?"

"No. No hologram. "

_The initial shock hadn't passed when the image snarled, stepped forward, smacked the glass of the mirror with its palms. Startled, Kim stumbled backwards, lost her footing, fell through the frosted glass of the shower door. _

_Laid there, writhing, groaning in pain._

_Glass was buried in her bare back, her arms, her legs, her feet. A huge piece of the shower door hung precariously in the frame, a guillotine blade about to fall across her slim white neck. _

_Her reflection glared in malign triumph._

_Then she jumped to her feet, standing on the glass shards, the pain and horror feeding her strength and determination. She hadn't survived all those supervillain schemes to be killed by a broken shower door. She'd faced and defeated things far more frightening than animate reflections._

_The glass guillotine fell and shattered behind her; it was her reflection's turn to be startled. Its inescapable death trap was an abject failure. Because it had expected her to lie there and wait to die. Because it had completely underestimated its target. It took more than a few pieces of broken glass to keep Kimberly Anne Possible down._

_And before it could try some other supernatural trick, Kim went on the offensive._

"I reached into the mirror. It was like water, ice water. I reached into the mirror and I yanked her out. I was _way_ furious by that time. " It had been hard to stop hitting the woman. "She finally went down. And then it wasn't my reflection any more. It was that girl they've got in custody. That's how it happened. Really." She looked to him for understanding, compassion, belief.

He looked like he'd wandered out of a war zone.

The shell-shocked expression kindled her redhead rage. "Oh, come _on_! We've been through stranger things than _that!"_

"Yeah." He laughed the nervous laugh. "If someone who wasn't you told me they'd _pulled a reflection out of a mirror_, I'd have a _problem_ with it."

She frowned. "It's the _truth_, Ron. I knew you'd believe me. You're the only one I've told. I told GJ's goons that she'd attacked me, but I didn't tell them how."

"Oh, absolutely, right, I _believe_ you," he replied, too quickly, too sincerely. "It's just, you know, I'd have a hard time with it if it was someone else. You know, that wasn't _you_."

"Is it any weirder than getting sucked into a television broadcast? _Several_ television broadcasts?"

"Good point –"

"Than switching bodies?"

"No, that was weird bordering on _wrong_ – and I meant to ask you, you know that little –"

She hastily cut him off. "Than having the same dream, at the same time, about the same incident?"

"It's _weirder_ than _that_. I mean, dreams are _normally_ weird. You know what I mean? Weird is normal for dreams. Is this making sense? This one guy dreamed about helicopters that were violins –"

"Ron, I'm sure the musical helicopter-slash-flying violins story has _something_ to do with the girl in the mirror, but I'm gonna ask you to back-burner that."

"All I'm sayin' is that it's strange. I'm not sayin' you didn't do it, and I'm not sayin' I don't believe it." He paused. " I'm just sayin'."

"I was just so mad. A person can't even take a _shower_ without interruptions from supervillains or aliens or monsters or ghosts. And I was hurting all over. I'd practically rolled in broken glass. The more it hurt, the madder I got."

"Like the Hulk."

"Unflattering comparison noted."

When Kim was on edge, talking to her was like walking a tightrope. On fire. "Did I say Hulk? I meant _She_-Hulk." It didn't help. Probably she didn't know the character. "Strong, clever superwoman." Something, maybe survival instinct, told him to omit the bit about green skin. He didn't need any Shego comparisons to further muddy the turbulent waters. "Strong, clever, _sexy_ superwoman."

A little laugh. "Better."

"So who was she? "

"No idea. Global Justice hasn't identified her yet. Not many of our enemies are into the occult stuff. Might have been some Yamanouchi dropout with an axe to grind. Or a Monkey Fist disciple. Who knows?"

" I'm just glad you're ok." He took her hand. "Well, ok except, you know, for the _cuts_ and stuff."

"It was no big, really. It's not like I'm a former child star jumpstarting her career with a nude death scene in a horror movie. " The words poured from her mouth like blood from a wound, like they'd been pent up under pressure, waiting for release. "_I'm Kim Possible_. " She said it as if it had been in question.

Ron blinked. Wondered if he'd ever know what was really behind all this. "Uh…yeah. Pretty peculiar _analogy_ there, KP. "

"Was it?" The dark mood passed; she smiled at her fiancé, an insouciant twinkle in her big green eyes. "I didn't notice."

It was several years before Ron learned that Magritte was from Belgium.


End file.
